Village Craftsmen

Ocracoke Newsletter

February 28, 2010

Early 20th Century Itinerants on Ocracoke

Most of them were just trying to pay their bills. Some were scam
artists. Others were attempting to save souls. In the early twentieth
century traveling salesmen, entertainers, photographers, confidence
men, and preachers wandered the country from coast to coast. In spite
of its isolation, Ocracoke Island attracted some.

A number of itinerants found their way to the small villages along
the mainland coast of North Carolina. From there a few booked passage
on the daily mailboat, or managed to convince local watermen to
carry them across Pamlico Sound to Ocracoke.

We know of several.

One man carried a leather satchel. From the mailboat dock he walked
down the village lanes peddling bed spreads, pillow cases, and assorted
linens.

Another brought his camera, tripod, chemicals, and other paraphernalia.
He knocked on doors offering to make family portraits for a fee.
With his equipment set up in parlors throughout the village he
produced many of the photographs that hang on islanders' walls today.

One enterprising individual somehow made his way to Ocracoke with a
trained bear. In the tradition of medieval and renaissance performers
he played a flute while the bear danced for the entertainment of
locals. After the performance the trainer passed his hat, hoping to
collect enough coins for room, board, and travel.

The "old toothbrush man" came to the island periodically. He sold small
black gum twigs, two for a nickel, which island women used for dipping
snuff (read more about the toothbrush man here).

Several itinerant preachers found their way to Ocracoke. Around 1916 or
1917 the famous evangelist Billy Sunday, and his accomplished and
talented music director, Homer Rodeheaver, held revival services at the
Coast Guard station.

Another traveling preacher came to the island for a short visit a
decade later. Moses LeFaver Cummings (1876 - 1963), also known as
"Blackie of the North Woods," was a colorful character. He held an open
air meeting near where Halo Hair Studio is located today, on Creek
Road, and attracted a large gathering of islanders, including men,
women, and children.

Blackie of the North Woods:
(Click on photo [courtesy Ginny Cummings] to view larger image.)

Because he sold, for 25 cents, a 33 page booklet, "Avenues Leading to
Crime and Blackie of the North Woods, His Life and Conversion" we know
quite a bit about Blackie. It is quite a story.

Front Cover of "Avenues Leading to Crime":
(Click on photo to view larger image.)

Blackie's mother, a young school teacher with Gypsy blood, and his
father, a blacksmith, married sometime after 1848 and settled in
Gananoque, Canada, near the St. Lawrence River and the Thousand
Islands. They soon had a baby daughter. According to Blackie, one day
his father stopped by a "public house" for a "social drink" that led to
"a terrible appetite inherited from his ancestors." After some time he
stopped drinking and the couple and their daughter moved
"from the city and its many temptations."

In 1876 the blacksmith and his wife were blessed with a baby boy "with
jet-black hair and big brown eyes.... The lumber jacks named him
Blackie."

When Blackie was just five years old his mother died of the "White
Plague" (probably tuberculosis), and eight years later his father
remarried. In the winter of 1889 Blackie's father contracted a severe
case of influenza, and the thirteen year old boy went to town for a
doctor. While there he stopped in a barroom, and returned to his log
cabin intoxicated. His father died just days later, and his stepmother
soon sold the cabin and blacksmith tools at auction. Blackie was left to fend for himself. By the time he was
seventeen years old he was working in a lumber camp.

The next several years found Blackie homeless, and wandering from place
to place. After joining up with a common thief he became a fugitive and
escaped the law by sleeping in the woods during the day and traveling
by night. It was 1895 and he had managed to make it all the way to
Inverness, Florida. There he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to the
convict phosphate mines where he was shackled with chains to a pickaxe.

By the time Blackie was released he had become a hardened criminal.
Shortly thereafter he "shot a man, got in with a Georgia outlaw, sold
moonshine, and finally got into a gunfight." Again he became a
fugitive, traveling through North Carolina and Virginia, eventually
arriving in Philadelphia, and later New York. There he met a young
lady, "cut out the booze," and was married in 1901. The couple had two
boys. "But alas," Blackie writes, "one day the tempter came...which
awoke again the terrible appetite for drink." Several years later
"booze and evil companions have wrecked his life and separated him from
his loving wife and little boys." He was divorced sometime after 1905.

In September of 1913, after traveling through Canada and the
northwestern United States, he arrived in San Francisco, where he was
contemplating suicide. On the way to San Francisco Bay he stopped to
listen to testimony from a Salvation Army officer, and was "born
again."

Evangelist M.L. Cummings ("Blackie of the North Woods"):
(Click on photo to view larger image.)

Blackie continued to travel throughout the United States and Canada,
but now as a "traveling evangelist and home missionary."

Although
he moved around often, Blackie eventually settled in North Carolina. At
some point he was befriended by Rev. Milton L. Johnson, pastor of th
Marsh Swamp Original Free Will Baptist Church in Simms, NC, just west
of Wilson. In his last years Blackie resided at the Wake County Home
for the Aged and Infirm on Whitaker Mill Road in Raleigh. He is buried
in the Marsh Swamp Church cemetery.

Blackie was about fifty years old when he arrived on Ocracoke Island. He had been a preacher for more than a dozen years.

Only a few Ocracokers remember the time that "Blackie of the North Woods" preached here. Although he may not have
made a significant impact on the island and its residents, he was an
interesting character who, along with traveling salesmen, animal
trainers, photographers, and others, contributed to the colorful
history of this tiny community.

Dr

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